Artist Statement
Our lives are interwoven together by the contrasts of darkness and light, change and constancy, stillness and movement. My paintings, drawings, and mixed media works delve into the dualities of the human experience, the beauty and pain of existing. I combine varied textures, colors, and lines with abstraction, organic shapes, portraiture, and text to symbolize different emotions, physical/mental/spiritual states, and perspectives (e.g. close, far, bird’s eye view, even beyond that, spaces between).
Through my art, I move closer to wonder, curiosity, and love toward our strange and bittersweet existence, while seeing my life and this world as it is, in all its coexisting sublimity and horror. My internal experience of life is directly linked with my art pieces, which express the intricacies of being alive, exploring the intersections between my own story of trauma and healing, existential questions, and a mystical connection to the natural world.
Embedded in the process of making my visual art is making music and writing. My art practice regards visual symbols and marks, sound, the written word, my physical body and voice, and my experience of everyday life as connected and vital. I treat each as both sacred and casual, all puzzle pieces to be played with, thrown into the air, scattered, interpreted, rearranged. For example, I often rip up unfinished drawings and paintings, collage them together with tape and glue, connect them with new marks, while adding text (thoughts and poetry devised in the moment and/or drawing from recent writings).
Every detail is a mode for emotional expression and making meaning of existence from color (e.g. purple for mysticism and awe, yellow for hope/joy, pink for vulnerability, blue for clarity, gray for confusion, black for deep pain/darkness/despair, green and brown for rootedness and connection to the earth) to the style of my handwriting (e.g. quick/slow, overlapped/spaced out, light/dark, capitalization, size) to mark-making (e.g. loose/tight, frenetic/gentle, bold/light, curved/straight). I also employ a range of materials to articulate the different facets of existence, including acrylics, watercolors, oil, ink, colored pencils, charcoal, graphite, paper, canvas, fabric, pins, embroidery thread, and found objects. While some of my pieces focus on one material (e.g. colored pencil drawing on paper or oil on canvas) or focus on a singular slice of how it feels to exist, many of my works weave together varied materials and layers of the human experience.
A few more thoughts …
Though many of my artworks are abstract or semi-abstract, I view abstraction as a spectrum rather than a singular category. Making art in-between abstract and figurative corresponds to how I sense the world around me. What does it look like to paint my experience of listening? What does it look like to paint my experience of a sunset? Realistic visuals can lie at the forefront, way in the background to the point of abstraction, or somewhere in-between.
Additionally, how does this experience shift based on whether the subject matter comes from recent memories or memories from my distant past, memories that are hard to access, the present moment, my imagination, etc? As someone who lives with complex PTSD, I understand that memory, time, and present moment experiences are complex. And all humans, whether or not they experience flashbacks and PTSD, experience time and memory in various ways. We can remember the past during the present moment. We can imagine the future during the present moment. We also create memories in the present moment that we carry with us into future moments and can recall later on. Beyond depictions of emotions and slices of human perception (sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell), the variations in texture, medium, realism versus abstraction, color, and use of text in my artworks can also be interpreted as expressions of time, including the distinct ways humans experience time and memory.
Writing the stories behind the works, poetry, and reflection questions as companions to my artwork is a part of my mission as an artist. I want to show that reflecting on art can be a method to get in touch with core values and inner wisdom, a way to live life truly present with this world, ourselves, and other people. My art is a part of my ambition to live honestly, joyously, openly, compassionately, courageously, freely, beautifully, and peacefully while still in touch with the realities of pain, struggle, and suffering.
